Feeling Tragic: Tragedy and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotion (PG)

Why do we enjoy tragedy? What is pleasurable about watching suffering? Why are pity and fear good kinds of emotions to have? How should we relate to tragic heroes and punish villains? How should we feel in the theatre and what kinds of feelings do we take home? These are questions that plagued seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. The Restoration saw the reopening of the theatres and the revitalisation of the drama in England. The late seventeenth century also saw the beginnings of literary criticism as a formal discipline while the eighteenth century ushered in what we now call aesthetic philosophy. Early criticism was anxiously concerned to assess the utility of literature's provocation of emotion and the culture at large wondered about the place of the passions in human life. Literature and philosophy alike looked to tragedy to provide a model for how we ought to be and act, and even more importantly, how we ought to feel. We can observe, simultaneously, an upsurge of concern for audience emotion, a complete reordering of tragedy as a genre and a widespread interest in sympathetic feeling. But many modern critics have insisted that tragedy dies an ignominious, bourgeois death in this period, subsequently flailing for upwards of a century in the crude histrionics of melodrama. Student on this this course will explore the early days of that supposedly bad, boring, bourgeois tragedy; investigate why it stayed on the stage and why eighteenth-century audiences liked it; examine what they thought it taught them; and discuss what it said about the structures of emotion that shaped eighteenth-century culture and made their way into modern definitions of the self. This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students. Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate

Not running in 2025/26